Recently a travel and tourism expert visited Wichita and said (and I hesitate to repeat his exact words on this family-oriented blog) “Your air service sucks.”
(See Tourism expert has frank tips for Kansas.)
I’m more than a little distressed to hear that. Right now we spend $6.5 million per year in subsidy to low-cost airlines in order to reduce airfares and improve service to and from Wichita. Is this subsidy not working?
Today the Wichita City Council holds a special meeting to consider a reformulated plan to provide tax increment financing (TIF) for the area surrounding the downtown Wichita arena. It’s still a bad idea.
It appears there are two major changes in the new plan. First, the TIF district is smaller. Second, spending on the district would be 70 percent of the new property taxes — the “increment” — instead of 100 percent.
Why is this plan a bad idea? Why, you may be asking, aren’t I in favor of development and progress in downtown?
To me, there’s a difference between entrepreneurs working in markets and government centralized planning. That’s one of the reasons why I oppose this TIF district. It represents government making plans for us, rather than people deciding themselves what they want. It’s the difference between political entrepreneurs — who work to please elected officials — and market entrepreneurs — who work to please customers.
If it turns out that when people express their preferences freely that they don’t really want much downtown development, that’s okay with me. I, for one, do not feel that I have the superior knowledge needed to tell people where they should go for fun and entertainment. I’d rather let people decide themselves.
I’m not willing to use the blunt tool of government to direct people and their money to where I think it should go. I wouldn’t do that even if I was convinced I was right.
But there are people in Wichita who don’t share my view of free people trading freely in free markets. Mayor Carl Brewer and several city council members — Sharon Fearey and Lavonta Williams being most prominent among them — and quasi-governmental organizations such as the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation feel differently. They feel that they know better than Wichitans do where development should be happening, and they’re willing to use the tools of government to force their vision upon you.
This is what’s happening at this time. This is why Wichitans need to oppose this TIF district.
Other article about TIF districts in Wichita: Do Wichita TIF Districts Create Value?, Downtown Wichita Arena TIF District, Wichita City Council’s Misunderstanding of Tax Increment Financing, Tax Increment Financing in Wichita Benefits Few, Tiff over Wichita TIFs, and Wichita City Manager’s Warning is Too Late.
A Wichita Eagle news story today tells how City Council divvies up tax dollars for the arts.
Can you imagine sitting through these meetings with people like Joan Cole and other members of the Arts Council as they decide who gets — and who doesn’t get — government largesse?
I imagine that these people actually think they have a heightened vision of what Wichitans should experience for their art and culture.
Why not let ordinary Wichitans decide what they prefer for arts and culture? Why not let the people decide which institutions they want to support, and to what extent?
As I explain in the post Government Art in Wichita: “Is this not a sterling example of an oxymoron? Must government weasel its way into every aspect of our lives?”
Reporting in the Wall Street Journal (Airports Suffer Terminal Illness) tells us that airports across the country are suffering just like the airlines:
This loss of passengers is creating a vicious economic spiral that is gripping airports across the country. At a time when airports have taken increasing roles in passenger comfort and care because of the service slide of airlines, today’s financial pressures are forcing major service reductions and financial strains.
The flight cuts will make the airport more expensive for airlines. Many airports set landing fees and terminal rents charged to airlines based on debt payments and operating costs. When the number of passengers is reduced, costs per passenger go up. Flights become less profitable, and airlines reduce schedules more, potentially driving per-passenger costs even higher. Cash-strapped airports will likely also scale back on upkeep and building improvements. Facing reduced foot traffic — and sales — struggling airport shops and restaurants may close. …
Southwest and other carriers say fuel cost and flight profitability are the biggest drivers influencing decisions on where to eliminate flights, but airport costs are becoming an increasingly important factor.
I’ve written in the past in posts such as Consider Carefully Costs of a New Wichita Airport Terminal that we in Wichita need to make sure that we don’t add costs to the airlines that they aren’t prepared to pay.
As shown in the accompanying chart (click on the chart for a larger version), Wichita’s air traffic has been growing at a faster rate than the nation as a whole. Recently it has leveled off and even dropped. What will happen in the future? Almost no one has an optimistic outlook for airlines, and with the recent turmoil in the markets, the outlook may be even bleaker. If there is any way to economize on Wichita’s new air terminal, I would urge us to do that.
Today, September 4, 2008, marks the first day of the ban on smoking in Wichita. It’s not quite a total ban, and that has some smoking ban supporters upset. In a letter to the Wichita Eagle, anti-smoking activist Cindy Claycomb writes “If you are a supporter of clean indoor air, please do not spend your money in businesses that allow smoking indoors, including smoking rooms. If we continue to spend our money at places that allow smoking indoors, that tells the business owners that we do not care — that we will tolerate secondhand smoke even though we all know the harmful effects.”
Not everyone is upset, though. In the Wichita Eagle article Smoking ban takes effect; for smokers, end of an era, Wichita city council member Sharon Fearey is quoted as “I feel this is an exciting time for the city.” If, like council member Fearey, you appreciate increasing government and bureaucratic management of the lives of Wichitans, you might be excited, too. Those who value liberty and freedom, however, are saddened — even if they aren’t smokers.
Fortunately Ms. Fearey is precluded from running again for her seat on the city council by term limits. The two architects of this smoking ban — Lavonta Williams and Jeff Longwell — can run for election again. The position held by Ms. Williams is up for grabs in the March 2009 primary. Hopefully the citizens of Wichita city council district one will elect someone respectful of property rights, not to mention personal rights.
For more coverage of the smoking issue and why it’s important, these articles will be of interest: It’s Not the Same as Pee In the Swimming Pool, Haze Surrounds Wichita Smoking Ban, Property Rights Should Control Kansas Smoking Decisions, Let Property Rights Rule Wichita Smoking Decisions, Testimony Opposing Kansas Smoking Ban, and No More Smoking Laws, Please.
In a statement read at the August 26, 2008 meeting of the Wichita City Council (see City Council Acts on Arena Area Redevelopment), Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer expressed his concern that “The naysayers have gotten too much media attention while those who are engaged and do the hard work are too often ignored and criticized.”
I think the mayor’s assessment is a little overblown. Can a tiny group of citizen volunteers — a ragtag group, some might say — manage to outmaneuver the vast resources of the City of Wichita and its allied quasi-governmental organizations such as Visioneering Wichita, Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce, Greater Wichita Economic Development Coalition, Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, and the Greater Wichita Convention and Visitors Bureau?
It doesn’t seem likely.
The mayor has the editorial board of the Wichita Eagle, the state’s largest newspaper, squarely behind almost all of his initiatives. Except for the fiasco surrounding the hiring of would-be city manager Pat Salerno, I can’t recall criticism of the mayor on the Eagle’s editorial page, except from citizens who write letters.
I can’t imagine any news reporter in town who, upon receiving an invitation from the mayor to come to his office, would not hurry over to City Hall and report on whatever the mayor said. At length.
The city has a Community Relations Team, consisting of three people (and perhaps other staff) with experience in media. The city’s website fares well in Internet searches, with its pages placing high in the search results pages of Google and other search sites.
We must also remember that the people doing the “hard work” the mayor mentioned are often city staff working at a job just like anyone else. Or, they might work for quasi-governmental groups like those mentioned above.
Importantly, remember that many of these people working for passage of the mayor’s economic initiatives stand to profit handsomely from them. These people — Wichita’s class of political entrepreneurs — prefer to earn their profits mining the halls of government power and the pockets of taxpayers rather than by pleasing customers in free markets. It’s a lot easier to please the mayor and a majority of the city council rather than working hard in the marketplace. These people get their share of media attention. They richly deserve criticism.
I believe that the mayor and the city council thought that passage of the expansion of the TIF district surrounding the downtown arena would be business as usual. But thanks to council member Paul Gray and a few snippets of coverage here and there in the newspaper, things didn’t proceed as usual.
On August 12, 2008, the Wichita City Council considered the establishment of a TIF district that would benefit Reverend Kevass Harding and his real estate development team. At the council meeting Reverend Harding spoke, and then John Todd spoke, and then myself. We all spoke for, I would guess, roughly the same amount of time.
On Monday August 18 I looked at the city’s website to read the minutes from that meeting. I printed the part of the minutes that covered this item. My printout may be seen in this image. But you don’t need to look at the printout to see what concerns me:
Reverend Harding’s remarks are covered using about 227 words in the minutes.
John’s remarks are covered using 24 words.
Mine are covered using 11 words.
Why the discrepancy? The mayor calls John and I “naysayers.” It is as simple, and as blatant, as that?
(John’s testimony may be read in the post Testimony Opposing Tax Increment Financing for the Ken Mar Redevelopment Project, and mine may be read in Reverend Kevass Harding’s Wichita TIF District: A Bad Deal in Several Ways. I make these remarks available on this website before I deliver my testimony, and I email notice of its posting to all council members plus a few other people at city hall.)
Even more curious, after we three testified, Mayor Carl Brewer delivered his “covered wagon” speech. You can read my transcription of it in Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, August 12, 2008, and some commentary in Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer Saves Us From Covered Wagons.
But nowhere in the minutes is it recorded that the mayor spoke, much less what he spoke about.
Then, even more curious, the minutes of this meeting are not available on the city council’s website today (Wednesday August 20, 2008). The minutes of the August 5 meeting are missing, too. A short while ago I wrote and asked for an explanation.
August 21, 2008 update: The missing city council minutes have been located. I forgot that they’ve been moved. The page Council Meetings Video On Demand is where minutes may be found.
Wichita politicians, newspaper editorial writers, and sometimes just plain folks are fond of bashing those they call the “naysayers,” sometimes known as CAVE people. An example is from a recent Opinion Line Extra in the Wichita Eagle:
An acquaintance in another city refers to the anti-everything people as “CAVE” people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything). I fear the GOP voters of western Sedgwick County have selected the ultimate CAVE person in Karl Peterjohn.
Naysayers, too, can’t be happy, according to a recent statement by Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer: “And I know that there’s always going to be people who are naysayers, that they’re just not going to be happy.”
If you read all of Mayor Brewer’s remarks at Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, August 12, 2008, you’ll learn that without government management of economic development in Wichita, we’d be back to the days of covered wagons. (I’m not kidding. He really said that, and I think he really believes it.)
Wichita’s news media, led by the Wichita Eagle, continually expresses a bias in favor of government. Even in news reporting this bias can be seen, as shown in the post The Wichita Eagle’s Preference For Government. On the Eagle’s editorial page, we rarely see an expansion of government interventionism opposed by the editorial writers. I can’t think of a single case.
But saying no to government doesn’t mean saying no to progress. It does mean saying “no” to the self-serving plans of politicians and bureaucrats. It means saying “no” to the dangers of collectivist thinking, as expressed in The Collectivism of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius.
It means saying “no” to Wichita’s political entrepreneurs, who seek to earn profits through government coercion rather than meeting the needs of customers in the marketplace. It means saying “no” to the public-private partnership, where all too often it is the risk that is public and the profit that is private. It means saying “no” to a monopoly on the use of public money in the education of children, and “no” to an expansion of that monopoly through a new bond issue.
So yes, I guess I and Wichita’s other naysayers are saying “no” to a lot of things.
But what we’re saying “yes” to is liberty and freedom. We’re saying “yes” to the rich diversity of human individuality instead of government bureaucracy. We’re saying “yes” to free people cooperating voluntarily through free markets rather than forced government transfers from taxpayers to favored individuals and programs.
We’re saying “yes” to consumers choosing which businesses in Wichita thrive, rather than politicians on the city council choosing. We’re saying “yes” to people making their own choices, rather than government “incentivizing” the behavior it desires through TIF districts and tax abatements, those incentives being paid for by taxpayers.
So let me ask you: what do you say “yes” to?
A post titled Keeping TIFs from a public tiff by Wichita Eagle business reporter Bill Wilson on the Eagle’s Business Casual blog reveals his bias in favor of government over individual action and preference.
My post The Wichita Eagle’s Preference For Government documents one such example from the past. In this blog post Mr. Wilson reveals more of this preference and the faulty assumptions that go along with it.
For example, he speaks of the need to “incentivize development.” Incentives are designed to get people to do something they wouldn’t do on their own. That pretty much describes downtown development. I’m sure that Mr. Wilson is aware that there’s lots of development going on in Wichita. It’s just not where politicians such as Wichita mayor Carl Brewer and council member Sharon Fearey want it to be. Add journalists like Mr. Wilson to this list, apparently. The Wichita Eagle editorial board has been on this list for a long time.
There’s nothing magic about downtown. The fact that people, when spending and investing their own funds, overwhelmingly choose to take action somewhere other than downtown is direct evidence of that. How arrogant is it for politicians and bureaucrats to overrule these decisions made freely by people acting in their own best interest?
In a comment, Mr. Wilson states “I have a hard time equating TIF money with a direct government handout …” I would encourage him to read the post Wichita City Council’s Misunderstanding of Tax Increment Financing, in which the author explains how TIF financing is, in fact, a direct subsidy to developers. I would be interested to see if Mr. Wilson can develop a refutation to this argument.
Mr. Wilson also writes of the need for “proper analysis and monitoring” of TIF district proposals. But government is ill-suited for either task. Politicians and government bureaucrats face a different set of incentives from private developers. Politicians seek to please their campaign contributers so they can be re-elected. Bureaucrats seek to preserve their own jobs and increase their domain of influence and power.
Market entrepreneurs, however, are directly accountable to their customers through the profit and loss system. If they do a good job anticipating what customers want, and if they are able to efficiently deliver what customers want, they’ll earn a profit. If not, they either change or go out of business.
Politicians and bureaucrats do not face such a stern taskmaster. When their decisions turn out to be faulty, the usual response is to pour more money into something that should be allowed to die. An example is the Old Town Warren Theater.